13 Suicide's at Foxconn China's Largest Electronics manufac

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In this photo taken on Feb 24, 2010, a recruiter from Foxconn talks to job applicants outside the factory in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong province. A Chinese employee of Foxconn Technology Group fell from a building and died Tuesday, May 25, 2010, state-run media said, in the 10th such death this year at the world's largest contract maker of electronics, such as the iPod, Dell computers and Nokia phones. (AP Photo) (AP / February 24, 2010)


GUANGZHOU, China (AP) — A Foxconn Technology worker tried to kill himself Thursday, becoming the 13th person to commit suicide or attempt to do so this year at the company, which makes high-tech products for industry giants such as Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, state media said.

Police said the man survived after cutting himself in his dormitory room at the factory, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It said the 25-year-old man, surnamed Chen, migrated from central Hunan province and began working at Foxconn two months ago.

Foxconn officials and police did not immediately answer calls by The Associated Press.

The 12 previous suicide attempts at Foxconn Technology Group's operations in southern China involved workers who jumped from buildings. Two survived. Another worker killed himself in January at a factory in northern China.


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On Wednesday night, a 23-year-old worker from the northwestern province of Gansu killed himself by leaping from a dormitory balcony. Hours earlier, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou had led a media tour of the industrial park and promised to work harder to prevent more deaths.

Gou said he couldn't sleep at night and dreaded answering his phone in off hours, fearing more news about deaths.

The Foxconn chairman showed off a motherboard factory, hot line center and even a swimming pool for employees. The walled-in industrial park, where 300,000 people work, looks like a small city, with palm tree-lined streets, fast-food restaurants, banks and a bookstore among huge factory buildings and towering dormitories.

Gou said the company would do everything possible to prevent more deaths. Safety nets were being installed on buildings and more counselors were being hired. He also said all the employees were being divided into 50-member groups, whose members would watch for signs of emotional trouble within their group.

Labor activists accuse the company of having a rigid management style, a too-fast assembly line and overwork. Foxconn denies the allegations.

The company, part of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., is the world's largest contract maker of electronics. Its long list of big-name customers include Apple Inc., Sony Corp., Dell Inc., Nokia Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.



Just hours after Terry Gou, the 59-year-old chairman and founder of Foxconn said he could not know when the next suicide would occur at one of his factories, a 23-year-old man jumped to his death.

At 11.20pm last night, a worker from Gansu province surnamed He became the 10th suicide victim at Foxconn’s Longhua plant this year.

He jumped on the same day that Mr Gou took the unprecedented step of opening up the factory to the media and promising that his company was doing everything it could to stop the rash of suicides.

Foxconn is the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and builds, among dozens of other high-ticket items, Apple’s iPad, which goes on sale in the UK tomorrow. However, the situation at the company’s Longhua plant, with its 300,000 workers, appears to be spiralling out of control.

The company has drafted psychiatrists, set up helplines, and even strung nets between buildings to catch jumpers. But the latest death shows how powerless it is to stop the suicide cluster from growing.

I don’t often feel sympathy for Foxconn – it is a notoriously secretive company which has a record of bullying its workers. However, it seems to me that Mr Gou is caught in a nasty bind.

In the full glare of the media spotlight, he was forced yesterday to retract a letter that he wanted his employees to sign that made them promise not to harm themselves.

The letter said that if workers committed suicide, they would receive the minimum compensation that is stipulated by Chinese law. One lawyer tells me that this is nil (suicide is not a workplace injury, so the company is not responsible, although in practice, companies do tend to pay some compensation).

When the media got hold of the letter, Mr Gou was forced to retreat. He admitted that “after our colleagues in legal went through it it seemed like we were forcing our employees [to agree to the terms] and this was not my intention”.

However it seems to me that short of barring all the windows and locking all the doors to all the rooftops (why on earth were they open in the first place?), that letter represented the best chance of getting the suicides to stop.

Without it, Foxconn finds itself in the position of continuing to pay 110,000 yuan (£11,000) in compensation to every person who jumps. For a depressed Foxconn employee, who still feels an obligation to repay his family for the cost of his or her upbringing and who would like to give his parents a lump sum that could transform their lives, this is a very tempting sum.

For a worker on the basic rate of 900 yuan a month, the compensation amounts to the equivalent of over ten years of gross salary. For a worker who is doing overtime and earning 1500 yuan a month, the compensation is still worth six years of salary.

If these enormous payments don’t stop, the suicides are unlikely to either. But if Foxconn takes the pragmatic option, there is every chance that its workers, fanned by the media, will revolt at its callousness. I would not want to be in Mr Gou’s shoes.


http://www.latimes.com/business/nationw ... 0144.story

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their motherboards suck.

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Foxconn 'suicide factory' raises pay 70%

Chinese workers at Foxconn, the China-based assembler of Apple’s iPad and other leading consumer electronics brands, are to receive a dramatic 70pc wage rise, raising the prospect of Western customers paying more for their electronic goods.




The move, which follows a spate of worker suicides this year at Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen, southern China, could also increase industry-wide pressure for higher wages among China’s factory workers, analysts said.

The latest wage increase comes just a week after Foxconn, which is the world’s biggest manufacturer of computer products – including iPhones, iPods and iPads for Apple, as well as goods for HP, Dell, Sony, Nokia and Nintendo – and employs 800,000 workers in China, increased pay for its Chinese assembly line staff by 30pc with immediate effect.

Protest at Chinese iPad maker after suicide attempts Following the latest rise, which will take full effect from October 1, the basic salary for production-line workers at Foxconn’s will have risen from 900 renminbi (£91.30) per month two weeks ago to 2,000 renminbi (£203).

“This wage increase has been instituted to safeguard the dignity of workers, accelerate economic transformation…and to rally and sustain the best of our workforce,” Foxconn’s founder and Chairman Terry Gou said in a statement.

“We are working diligently to ensure that our workplace standards and remuneration not only continue to meet the rapidly changing needs of our employees, but that they are best in class.”

Foxconn’s wage increases fit a growing trend in China where the country’s coastal manufacturing zone are being hit by labour shortages as more factories move inland, spurred by government policies aimed at driving Chinese factories up the value-chain.

This year local governments across southern China have announced minimum wage increases averaging 20pc in a bid to retain workers and mitigate the impact of inflation on food and house prices caused by China’s massive monetary stimulus in the last 18 months.

Last week, Honda, the Japanese car maker settled a two-week strike at its transmission plant in southern China by agreeing to inflation-busting wage increases of 24-34pc.

Demographic expert say China’s vast pool of labour which has allowed it to grow at double-digit rates over the past two decades, with low-inflation, is starting to dry up, and will start to contract from 2015 as the working-age population feels the impact of the one-child policy.

“The [Foxconn] pay raise will put pressure on other companies that are currently cashing in on the cheap labour of China. The era of cheap Chinese labour is over,” said Mars Hsu, a Taipei-based analyst with Grand Cathay Securities.

Chinese analysts agreed. “The Foxconn wage increases have broken the once-solid salary ceiling and it will definitely affect other enterprises”, said Lin Boqiang, head of the energy economics research center with Xiamen University in Fujian province.

Analysts estimated that the latest wage increase would account to nearly one third of profits made by Foxconn’s Taiwanese parent company Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. in the three months to March.

Foxconn executives have not made clear how the additional wage costs will be absorbed, however a spokesman said it was time the global supply chain “faced the issue” of applying international standards to workers’ salaries.

“These moves are symbolic and significant,” says Dong Tao, a Hong Kong-based economist at Credit Suisse, “The outcome is simple: manufacturers either improve productivity, shrink their margins or pass the costs on to consumers.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/chin ... -70pc.html